Detail from
Peasants at the Table (El Almuerzo) c. 1620
Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez,
Oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Now that I am semi-retired with much more free time than my wife, who still teaches, she reckoned that it was about time I started to tackle some of the house work.
As a 57 year old male I am, I think , reasonably well house trained. The kitchen holds no fears for me and I can, should I feel the need, tackle the hoovering/ dusting tasks (the fact that I don’t feel the need as often as my wife is irrelevant)
The one black hole in my house skills canon however, and that one that my wife determined to rectify, is laundry.
Not being prepared as yet to trust to me the higher levels of the washing machine, with its pitfalls of colours and fabric types involving one in the third level skills of sorting and reading washing instructions, my wife decided to start by giving me a series of tutorials on ironing.
I had up to this always imagined that I could iron and had been known to rub the iron over something if needed.
That this involved only taking the creases out of those parts which would be exposed to the world was, I assumed a general practice.
However it must be confessed that if I was appearing anywhere where I was likely to be closely observed I would get herself to do the pressing.

It is now about three months since I started to iron and I think I am getting the hang of it, so much so that I have decided to share my new found skills with the world.

First thing to do is to have ready a hanger hanging on a hook somewhere clean ready to receive the crisp freshly ironed shirt.
Then set up the ironing board.
(If you haven’t already been shown how to do this it may take some time, I speak from experience here)
Next plug in the iron and then fill it with water should it be a steam iron.
(If it isn’t don’t)
Next read the label on the shirt with its ironing instructions (this is the little picture of an iron on a label, usually hidden down a side seam.)
Count the amounts of dots on the picture of the iron and then set the iron on a setting with one dot more than the picture. (the manufacturers always err on the side of caution in this, should you believe them you will spent hours of effort pressing to no avail. All women are born knowing this fact.)
Now shake out the shirt and, as if you were hiring a car and checking it for scratches or dents, check for previous stains or scorch marks.
If you find any mark their exact location on a chart.

The first thing to press is the collar.
This like all parts of the shirt should be ironed inside out.
(this reduces the risk of scorch marks on the side that shows)
However as we in fact wear our collars inside out this is the one piece you press on the outside.
Work from the outside edge of both sides of the collar in towards the middle, this way you avoid unsightly creases at the front seam of the collar.

Now, holding the shirt inside out, hold it by the seam that runs across the back under the collar, this is –I believe- called the yoke, or else the yolk or else something completely different. I am relying on my mother’s term here and she, it turns out, was an most unreliable witness.
She may well have called it the yoke on the basis that she couldn’t remember its proper name.
Now iron this yolk/yoke carefully.
The next bit to tackle are the sleeves, first the cuffs.
The cuffs are a bit of a doddle, just lay them inside out and hammer away.
The sleeves are a different matter altogether.
Apparently it is a sign of extreme lack of skill to leave creases on a sleeve, this is how you avoid it.
With the sleeve inside out take it by the seam and then smooth the whole sleeve down with your hand.
Now iron the sleeve but, and this is the tricky bit, stop just before you get to the edge of the length.
Now reverse the sleeve and on the other side do exactly the same.
Because sleeves are not symmetrical you will have miraculously managed to iron all the sleeve and have left no crease.
(If you can’t manage this the first time don’t worry, the knack eventually comes with practice)
A small note here, don’t proceed to the main body of the shirt without doing the second sleeve.
It is extremely disappointing to arrive at a triumphant conclusion only to find an unironed sleeve hanging guiltily from the side of the crisp shirt.
I speak from experience again here.

The next stage is to tackle the main body of the shirt.
Start with the back and iron the tail, that is that piece which stretches from the yolk/yoke down. This bit too is a doddle.
Next bit to do is the side with the buttons.
This bit also requires a little care.
Laying the shirt inside out press away on the body and then cautiously approach the placket on which are hung the buttons.
(Excuse me for being a little technical here)
Now I have two methods for tackling these.
The differing methods depend on my mood and the thickness of the buttons.
Method one is to hammer away over the buttons as if they weren’t there, this gets the placard reasonably flat and is the fastest. (Remember this will be fully hidden by the placard holding the buttonholes)
The disadvantage of this method is that sometimes this causes a button to shoot off its moorings, or, more unusual this , melt.
Either way this can involve one in the skill of “sewing” which is a different one altogether to ironing and one where I am sorry I can’t help you.
The safer, if slower option is that once you come to the button area you then make little incursions with the mere point of the iron in and out of the spaces between the buttons.
Then, and this one I still find tricky, you have to press that tiny area of cloth between the buttons and the edge.
This has to be done by reversing the shirt and daring to iron on its correct side.

Last and easiest bit, like the biblical best wine , is that side which has the button holes. The only potential disaster area on this is should it contain a pocket.
First check that the pocket is totally empty.
Then approach the whole area with caution, turning frequently to make sure that the pocket hasn’t got itself into a pleat.
Take your time, it usually works out in the end.

And then that is it.
Now take the shirt carefully and hang it on its awaiting hanger, then move it out of any dangerous areas and into a sterile environment as soon as you can.

Then proceed with the next one..

This is a detail from a picture called
Still Life with a Box of Sweets and Bread Twists
painted in 1770 by Spanish artist
Luis Melendez
which now hangs in the Prado in Madrid.

Libby is Jenny and Barts daughter.
My friends Roxanne and Joe’s first grandchild
she came to see us yesterday and to my intense
satisfaction I succeeded in making her laugh!

This year, just like last year, when the school year finished Sile took home the little sunflower plants which she had raised from seed for her pupils and we stuck them in the garden before we left.

As we drove down through France in July the fields were all full of serried ranks of beaming sunflowers all facing directly and obediently towards the sun, not a single one darting a glance so much as a millimetre to the right or left.

As we drove back, in late August, they were all ready for harvesting, their petals browned or fallen their hearts swollen with oil.

Our Waterford sunflowers were yet to flower when we got back.
They have managed it, well most of them have, in the last week and very beautiful they look.

Now I am quite happy to put the late flowering down to the late planting or our more northern polar position but when I went out to look at them this morning, a beautiful sunny day, I noticed something else unusual about them.
Unlike their French cousins these Irish lads were not looking at the sun.
In fact if you examine the above photo carefully you will see that all of them are looking in different directions.
My theory is that they are far too curious to spend their days looking in one direction, even if that does change as the sun moves across the sky.
Being Irish Sunflowers they would be petrified that they might miss something.
This would explain their extreme lateness in developing because of not absorbing the requisite amounts of ultra violet.
I think I prefer my independent minded sunflowers, but then I am not looking to harvest any oil from them.

Why can’t I remember anything anymore.
It’s the recent stuff, like the name of the scheme we have deposited money in, it’s the initials that fox me, SSIAS,JNLR,SBI what the hell are they all?
I do remember that my mother was just the same when she was my age.
She insisted to a builder that she needed a JCB to support a wall when we were getting a job done in our house at home. (she meant of course an RSJ)
She also seriously upset a girl in Scott’s paint shop in Mc Curtain St in Cork (does anyone remember Scott’s ? I think it burned down in the fifties) by looking for some Ten, Ten Twenty to clean the carpet.
Ten, Ten Twenty, it turned out is the stuff you use to fertilise the land.
My mother was looking for One Thousand and One
(“Cleans a big big carpet, for less than half a crown”)
There you see, that is the other half of it, I have no trouble in remembering that awful jingle from the very early sixties.
I can remember very little to do with names, or initials from my recent past but cannot be fooled on any piece of irrelevant trivia from my distant past.
The further back the better.

My elder sister arrived back from Italy in the early sixties with various 45’s (do you remember 45’s?) of songs which were brief Italian hits at the time.
I am still word perfect in these songs, and given the correct amount of alcohol, have been known to sing them in Italian Restaurants and even international chef’s conferences to the bewilderment of the listening Italians,
Anyone for “Ora sei remasta sola”, or “Il Pullover” ?
Even the listening Italians can’t remember the words as well as I can.

Another example of my minds unwillingness to lose any random pieces of trivia has to do with plays, operettas and musicals.

I suppose the musicals should come first.
My parents used to enjoy musicals and make occasional forays to London to see them.
They inevitably came back with the 33 inch long playing record (Remember those?)
This leaves me fairly well word perfect to this day in Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Pyjama Game, South Pacific, Irma La Douce to name but a few.

This is an illness that has afflicted all of my family members.
All one has to do is hum a few bars from the overture of My Fair Lady(for instance) and the seven Dwyer siblings won’t rest until they have bellowed their tuneless way through all of the numbers in the show, to the profound embarrassment of their spouses, and the total terror of anybody else present.

Operettas, particularly Gilbert and Sullivan ones have a similar effect on me. I can rattle my way through most of the patter songs (some of which haven’t dated very well) and can even sing a lot of the female solos, this a relic of the days when by unbroken voice was required to give an imitation of these in the hall of Christian Brothers College in Cork in the Sixties.

The plays bit is rather more useful.
I spent a great number of years in the Loft, the Cork Shakespearian Society. While there I must have been involved in the production of at least a dozen of the bards plays.
Most of these I can still stumble through.
(When one has heard something rehearsed incessantly for a six month period it does tend to sink in well)
This was the most useful one.
I was able always to quote great gobbets of Shakespeare at will since those days.
I have no doubt that this was the single most important thing that helped me to scrape a BA in English many years later.

But all these great store houses of knowledge, this hard drive of information are just as about useless in my present life as an intimate knowledge of the “W” section of a 1958 phone book would be.
My wife who, unlike me can remember things in the recent past, despairs of me forgetting names and numbers (don’t even start me on passwords)
Mind you I am better at remembering than her when we go back a few years.
I sometimes cheer myself up by pretending that this is a medical condition. About 15 years ago I had a brain Haemorrhage and as a consequence lost completely and totally about two months of my life.
Apparently during this time I was behaving much as I always did, I just can’t remember it.
Then I remember my mother and her total inability and indeed unwillingness to get to terms with names, and I realise that it is hereditary.
She was most intolerant of car indicators for instance and always called them doo-dahs. Up to my early twenties as a consequence, I thought that doo-dah was the correct technical term for these.
I’m fairly like that myself, if the name doesn’t come immediately I will go for a handy one that might have the same initial, or rhyme or something.
It is laziness really.
I always subscribe to the notion that as we get older we don’t want to bother to remember any new bits of information unless we think them of huge importance.
I am reminded of Marilyn Monroe’s bon mot when she said “I can never remember a new phone number without forgetting an old one”

By the time we are into our fifties and the brain cells have, they tell us, been in decline since the age of 23 (when they peaked) we obviously have no further room for storage without clearing out loads of old rubbish.
I recently took my camera for a seven week holiday.
The memory thingy has room for about 500 pictures which I soon used up.
Then I had to start deleting.
This worked for a while until I realised that I was starting to delete stuff I wanted to keep.
Then a technological friend helped out and let me download my photos on to a CD.
This was brilliant,and this of course is my solution.

I propose that some whizz kid out there set up some simple mechanism where all my useless trivia banks can be downloaded on to CDs.
These I can leave in a cupboard somewhere and haul out only when the occasions demand.
(On Italian holidays for instance, or going to the light Opera festival in Waterford, or a trip to Stratford on Avon)
On these rare occasions we can get a quick trivia recharge.
This should clear plenty of space for new acquaintances and computer terms, acronyms, and other modern trivia.

I’m not convinced though.
I might just rather keep the Shakespeare.

These are the shots which for one reason or another
didn’t make it into the holiday saga.
Some I had down loaded onto Michael’s computer
in Spain when my memory became full in my camera,
and which he kindly transferred onto disc and sent on to me,
others are just downright bad shots, usually where my
hand shook.

When we were going over in the boat I decided the
funnel of the boat looked like a robot with its arms
out wearing glasses.

In our first camp site, in Mayet, on the way down,
by a lake, there was a lovely, lived in and battered
chateau next to us.It just seemed so French.

Sunset through the trees in Mayet.

Another shot of the Lot in Capandec.
These still flowing rivers are just beautiful.

This is an object lesson on why one should wear a helmet
while bicycling.I got my first black eye ever.
I still have a scar on my eyebrow.

Venus, in a life jacket, rises from the Ceze

Last year I read The Stones of Balazuc by historian
John Merriman. This is a sort of micro history of
Europe from the viewpoint of one town.
The village was in the Ardeche, quite near us in
Goudargues so we went to see it.
It was a stunner, built up over the river.

I took this shot of the Alhambra from the Museum
of Archeology in Granada

And this one of the Museum from the Alhambra.

This was the moment when we were buying the
delicious cakes, through a turnstile, from the Poor
Claires in Granada.
Sile nudged me to tell me not to take the shot, that
a nun was approaching, so the camera shook,
thus the blur, and I didn’t have the courage to take
another.

I love this shot of the layers of the Sierra Navada which
I took from the campsite. They seem to go on for ever,
layer after layer of mountains.

This one I took in the vestry of the cathedral in Granada.
Again the old shakey hands blurred the shot.
I still like it though, and it proves we were there.

This being the tenth and final instalment of what
we did on our summer holidays 2006.

After Annecy we went on the last leg of our journey
to stay with Sile’s brother, Brian and Sister-in -law Beth
in their new house near Dinan in Brittany.

Beth at the door of the cottage.

Dinan, which I think is the prettiest town in Brittany,
is a place Sile and I keep coming back to.
It has been beautifully mantained with cobbled streets
and romantic and bockety houses and terrific Brocante shops.
One place we hadn’t got to was the Basilica of St. Saviour
so we arrainged to meet in the square outside

While we were sitting in a cafe on the square a bride and groom
sat at the table next to us and had a beer.
I got a shot of them as they left.

Beth, who is an eagle eyed archeologist, had spotted a detail
on one of the entrance towers of the church.

It was a 15th Century Tom and Jerry
placed there, almost out of sight, by a whimsical stonemason.

The windows in the chursh were mostly modern and very bright.
(The originals having been shattered in the war, and probably ending
up in Fontfroide)
This gave the beautiful play of light on the old seats and pews.

There in the windows we found our own Fiachra the French
patron of gardeners and cab drivers.

Connecting the town to the old port on the Canal de Rance
is the amazing Rue de Jeruzal, steep and cobbled
without a vertical or a perpendicular
it must be one of the most photographed in Brittany.

It also has a couple of nice Brocante shops.

And some pretty bridges over the Canal de Rance .

So after Dinan we were only a couple of hours from Cherbourg
and the ferry home.

I can’t say I was dying to get back.
But now we had our toe in the door of France,
with our proposed purchase in the Languedoc,
with that in mind I can’t see us ever
going on such a marathon holiday again.
But you would never know.

Yellow Canoes on the River Lot at Capendac